Election panel is either delusional or attempting to thwart Democrats
The truth can’t be repeated often enough: The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which held its first meeting last week, is a sham and a scam. It was born out of a marriage of convenience between conservative anti-voter-fraud crusaders, who refuse to accept actual data, and a president who refuses to accept that he lost the popular vote fair and square.
It is run by some of the nation’s most determined vote suppressors, the kind who try to throw out voter registrations for being printed on insufficiently thick paper or who release reports on noncitizen voting that are titled “Alien Invasion” and illustrated with images of UFOS.
Its purpose is not to restore integrity to elections but to undermine the public’s confidence enough to push through policies and practices that make registration and voting harder, if not impossible, for certain groups of people who tend to vote Democratic.
Its first, shaky steps have already created chaos. At least seven lawsuits have been filed against it; dozens of states have rejected some or all of its bumbling, and possibly illegal, request for voter data; and thousands of voters have dropped their names from state rolls, with most telling officials that they didn’t trust the commission or were upset to find out how much of their personal information was public.
In short, the commission is a fraud on the American people, and a far greater threat to electoral integrity than whatever wrongdoing it may claim to dig up.
At the meeting last week, the commissioners lived down to expectations, repeating their stale and baseless claims about hordes of noncitizens, former felons, dead people and other ineligible voters storming polling stations.
President Donald Trump himself dropped by to introduce the proceedings and attack the state officials who have refused to turn over voter data. “If any state does not want to share this information, one has to wonder what they’re worried about,” Trump said. That’s pretty rich coming from a man who refuses to release his tax returns. It’s also specious. The data on fraud allegations have, in fact, been analyzed for years, and have confirmed time and again what election officials from both parties report from firsthand experience: Voter fraud is extremely rare, and in-person fraud — the only kind that can be caught by those voter-id laws — is essentially nonexistent.
If the commission were serious about improving confidence in elections, it would focus on real problems afflicting voting and registration — like aging voting machines, hourslong lines at the polls and cyberattacks by hostile nations.
Instead it plans to rely on tools like the Interstate Crosscheck System, a notoriously inaccurate anti-fraud data program championed by Kris Kobach, the commission’s vice chairman and crusader in chief. The Crosscheck program compares voter rolls to identify people who register and vote in multiple states — but for every actual double-voter it finds, it returns 200 false positives. That is, it’s wrong 99 percent of the time. But this hasn’t stopped Kobach, who, in his other job as Kansas’ secretary of state, has been one of the most influential promoters of restrictive voting laws. Called “the Javert of voter fraud” by a Kansas newspaper, Kobach has secured a total of nine convictions for double voting over the years — most of them older Republican men.
Now vaulted to the national stage, Kobach insists the commission is not relitigating Trump’s bogus claims of illegal voting. Yet after last week’s meeting he was asked whether Hillary Clinton had won the popular vote. “We may never know the answer to that question,” he replied. (We do; she did.)
There are two possible explanations for why Kobach and his team continue to pursue their anti-fraud campaign. Either they know it’s all a lie but want to increase Republican electoral chances, or they actually believe their own paranoid fantasies. It’s hard to know which poses the bigger danger to democracy.